A Love Affair with Birds: The Life of Thomas Sadler Roberts - Hardcover

Leaf, Sue

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0816675643 ISBN 13: 9780816675647

Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2013

Synopsis

Imagine a Minneapolis so small that, on calm days, the roar of St. Anthony Falls could be heard in town, a time when passenger pigeons roosted in neighborhood oak trees. Now picture a dapper professor conducting his ornithology class (the university’s first) by streetcar to Lake Harriet for a morning of bird-watching. The students were mostly young women—in sunhats, sailor tops, and long skirts, with binoculars strung around their necks. The professor was Thomas Sadler Roberts (1858–1946), a doctor for three decades, a bird lover virtually from birth, the father of Minnesota ornithology, and the man who, perhaps more than any other, promoted the study of the state’s natural history. A Love Affair with Birds is the first full biography of this key figure in Minnesota’s past.

Roberts came to Minnesota as a boy and began keeping detailed accounts of Minneapolis’s birds. These journals, which became the basis for his landmark work The Birds of Minnesota, also inform this book, affording a view of the state’s rich avian life in its early days—and of a young man whose passion for birds and practice of medicine among Minneapolis’s elite eventually dovetailed in his launching of the beloved Bell Museum of Natural History.

Bird enthusiast, doctor, author, curator, educator, conservationist: every chapter in Roberts’s life is also a chapter in the state’s history, and in his story acclaimed author Sue Leaf—an avid bird enthusiast and nature lover herself—captures a true Minnesota character and his time.

About this title

About the Author:

Sue Leaf is the author of Potato City: Nature, History, and Community in the Age of Sprawl and The Bullhead Queen: A Year on Pioneer Lake (Minnesota, 2009), a finalist for the Minnesota Book Awards. She is the president of the Wild River Audubon Society of east-central Minnesota.

From Booklist:

In 1867, when his wealthy, TB-stricken father heeded doctor’s orders to leave dirty Philadelphia, 9-year-old Roberts embraced the rich natural habitat around the frontier town of Minneapolis. At age 16, he formed the Young Naturalists’ Club, and at 18, he used meticulous field notes to compose a paper challenging a prominent naturalist’s opinion on black terns. Serious birding disappeared from Roberts’ life when he went east for medical school, came home a doctor, and started a family. But birding reclaimed increasing amounts of his time, and he closed his practice in 1915, when the University of Minnesota hired him as a professor of ornithology and as curator of the Zoological Museum. His two-volume The Birds of Minnesota was published in 1932. Roberts’ letters and notes offer rich descriptions of birdlife, contact with many birding pioneers, and a view inside the shotgun-reliant, ­specimen-obsessed world of early birding. Yet the stuffy Roberts, who indirectly witnessed an astounding loss of natural habitat, will never be confused for a conservation visionary, narrowing the appeal of this book to avid birders. --Dane Carr

About this edition

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0816675643
• ISBN 13: 9780816675647
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 296